1,500 fed-up Kyushu citizens
sue to evict yakuza HQ
—
No one wants mob presence amid turf war
By DAVID McNEILL
(This article, which first appeared in
the Japan Times of Oct. 11, 2008,
is reproduced here in Eyes on Japan by kind permission of the
author.)
KURUME, Fukuoka Pref. — The
yakuza's reputation for unpredictability and violence keeps journalists
away, but a deadly turf war between two rival gangs in Kyushu has made the
mob reluctant media fodder.
The two-year war has resulted in
seven deaths and more than 20 shootings and bombings.
Now, in an unprecedented act of
collective courage, 1,500 Kurume residents are taking the mob to court to
force their ouster.
"The yakuza are using weapons
like the kind you see in the Iraq war: grenades, bombs and guns that can
shoot people from 500 meters away," said lawyer Osamu Kabashima, who
is representing the plaintiffs.
"My clients have had enough.
They want to live in safety and peace."
In the most notorious episode in the
war, a gangster walked into a hospital and pumped two bullets into an
innocent man mistaken for a rival.
In another, the 1,000-member
Dojin-kai gang's headquarters, in a busy shopping district in the city,
came under a sub-machinegun attack.
Those attacks finally snapped the
patience of locals, who have banded together to drive the mob out, using a
civil law that allows them to challenge businesses that "infringe on
their right to live peacefully."
Win or lose, the legal fight will go
down in history. "This is the first time that citizens are trying to
expel the head office of a designated gangster organization,"
heralded the liberal Asahi newspaper, which called on local businesses and
government leaders to support the plaintiffs and "drive the yakuza
into extinction."
That seems unlikely. The National
Police Agency estimates there are more than 84,000 gangsters in the
country's underworld syndicates, many times the strength of the U.S. Mafia
at its violent peak. A single group, Yamaguchi-gumi, is the General Motors
of organized crime, with nearly 40,000 members in affiliates across Japan
and a walled central compound in one of the wealthiest parts of Kobe.
Fan magazines, comic books and
movies glamorize the yakuza, who operate in plain view in a way
unthinkable to American or European observers. Dojin-kai's headquarters is
public and known to any Kurume taxi driver.
Signs pasted on the doors of the
six-story building politely explain that the organization has temporarily
moved and provides its new address on the other side of the train station.
The tangled relationship between the
yakuza and legitimate businesses, particularly real estate, show how the
mob has metastasized into the economy and society at large, and will not
easily be removed.
In March, Suruga Corp., a once
listed company, was revealed to have paid over ¥15 billion to Koyo
Jitsugyo, an Osaka firm linked to a Yamaguchi-gumi affiliate. In return,
from 2003 to 2007, Koyo gangsters removed tenants from five properties
Suruga wished to acquire, taking on average 12 to 18 months to empty a
building.
"We cannot make profits unless
we sell land quickly," Takeo Okawa, director of Suruga's general
affairs department, told the Asahi newspaper. "Speed is our lifeline.
Koyo proved that it had the speed." Suruga reportedly made ¥27
billion in profit by selling the property.
Dojin-kai's new headquarters,
immediately identifiable by its business nameplate, is a two-story
compound in one of Kurume's better neighborhoods. The acting boss sits in
a conference room dominated by portraits of deceased Chairman Yoshikazu
Matsuo in ceremonial kimono. Matsuo was murdered last year.
"We have always had a strong
relationship with local people, so this is a bad situation for us,"
he said. "It is obvious that they are being manipulated by the cops
who want to crush us."
Police, who declined to go on
record, denied this, as did lawyer Kabashima. "No ordinary person
wants to live beside these gangs," he said. "There is a school
close to the site of the machinegun attack. What if the bullets had hit
children?"
Kabashima and his family have lived
in fear since he was outed in the media last year, but he says his foes
are "not stupid enough" to attack him. "They cannot move
against me without severe consequences."
 The yakuza have long occupied an
ambiguous position. Like their Italian cousins, they have murky historical
links with political power, in the yakuza's case with the Liberal
Democratic Party. A reputation for keeping disputes between themselves and
not harming "non-combatants" protected them from the ire of
citizens and the attention of police.
That ambiguity was supposed to have
ended in 1992 when the government introduced the toughest anti-mob
legislation in a generation — punishment for yakuza excesses during the
booming 1980s when they shifted into real estate and other legitimate
businesses.
But the state still hasn't made
membership of a criminal organization illegal or given police the
mob-fighting tools long considered crucial in other countries:
wiretapping, plea bargaining and witness protection.
The authorities and the yakuza
"have achieved a kind of balance where they basically accept each
other's existence but pretend otherwise," said Tomohiko Suzuki, a
journalist who specializes in crime writing. "It's very Japanese. The
1992 law was a kind of performance for the public."
A new police white paper warns that
the yakuza have moved into securities trading and infected hundreds of
Japan's listed companies, a "disease that will shake the foundations
of the economy." Experts say Yamaguchi-gumi in particular has become
a behemoth with resources to rival Japan's larger corporations.
The lack of legal tools to fight the
yakuza is painfully obvious in Kyushu, where the law only allows the
plaintiffs to challenge thugs within a 500-meter radius of their homes.
"It's not easy to kick them out of town," lamented one, who
spoke on condition of anonymity. "We're demanding that they stop
using the building as a gathering place. They own the building; it's their
property and we can't make them give it up."
Even if they move, the mob will
simply pop up somewhere else in Kurume, a senior city official admitted on
condition of anonymity. The city is backing the plaintiffs. "I guess
it is correct to say that Japanese people have learned to live with the
yakuza," the official said.
Unchallenged, Dojin-kai will invest
huge untaxed profits in real estate, eventually taking over whole blocks.
"We have to hope that even if they relocate, the residents of the new
area will challenge them again," the official said. "The yakuza
are strong on a one-to-one basis, but they are extremely weak in the face
of collective action."
Kurume's latest problems began in
May 2006 when longtime Dojin-kai boss Seijiro Matsuo suddenly announced
his resignation, sparking a war of succession with splinter group Kyushu
Seido-kai that erupted in front of Dojin-kai's Kurume headquarters with an
AK-47 attack.
Not everyone is rooting for the
plaintiffs. "We're not against the people going to court, but if they
win, the yakuza might relocate close to us and that would cause problems
for my business," said Yuichiro Okamura, who owns a small restaurant
next to Kurume Station.
The owner of a vegetable shop next
to the Dojin-kai building said the plaintiffs should let sleeping dogs
lie. "The yakuza have never done anything to me. But the people in
that building have much better manners than some of the youngsters around
here today."
© David McNeill 2008
for the Japan Times. All
rights reserved
 |
An extended version of
this article can be found over at Japanfocus.org. |
Editor's note: Dr. McNeill completed his PhD on
the Japanese information society at Napier University, Edinburgh in 1998.
He went on to teach at universities in Ireland, England and China before
taking up his current position with Sophia University in Tokyo. I'd like
to express my gratitude to Dr. McNeill
for his kind permission to republish the above article here in Eyes
on Japan.
|
